Trauma Junk Chapter Summary

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One experience that stood out to me in the book “Trauma Junkie, Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse” would be the first flight that Janice is involved with in the beginning of the book. During this incident, the emergency flight rescue team is called to Santa Cruz for a motorcycle accident. While in the helicopter on the way there Janice is very nervous and messes up on her radio calls to back to base and freezes up a couple of times. Janice has to ask her co worker Harry for some help with the radio a couple times. When the helicopter lands, the rescue team finds a firefighter and asks him what is going on and they figure out that there have been multiple accidents very close to one another, about a mile apart from each other to be exact. …show more content…

The victim had planted his face into the back of a parked van while he was driving about seventy miles an hour without a helmet on his motorcycle. Janice was instructed to takeover bagging the patient from a firefighter who was already there. Bagging the patient was nearly impossible because of the severity of his injuries; every time Janice went to give him a breath, blood squirted out and covered her goggles, making it difficult for her to see what she was doing. A couple minutes later, Harry tried to intubate the patient but could not see anything he was doing due to massive amounts of blood, so Janice began to bag the patient again as Harry went and asked someone driving a pickup truck to give them a ride back to the helicopter, the driver, although startled from the accident hesitantly agreed to give them a ride back. While driving back after passing the county line into Santa Cruz, Harry asked the driver to pull over and he made an incision in the patient's neck, and put a trach tube in to ventilate the …show more content…

A second would be making sure to keep the patient still and not move his neck or head to be sure if he did have any injuries to his spine, they would not increase the injuries. Another medical intervention would be when Harry tried intibating the patient on scene even though it was unsuccessful. Another intervention that occurred during this incident was, Harry making the incision in the patient's neck while driving back to the helicopter, allowing him to put in a tracheal tube and give the patient the first good ventilations sense the accident occurred, which could have been the difference between the patient living or dying. Lastly, the flight squad did everything they could very quickly so they could get the patient back to the helicopter and to the trauma center as soon as

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